Hines: Time to pass the biscuits to a new passel of Texans

CRAGG HINES, Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Far be it from me to decide if it's time for Texas to have another singing governor, but with Kinky Friedman's battered cowboy hat in the ring, surely it's time to recall some other oddball candidacies. Most importantly, don't forget that a couple of them were elected.

I'll admit up front that my favorite unorthodox (the word has no religious connotation in this context) Texas contender never got to first base. Why even once, the State Democratic Executive Committee had the nerve to reject the attempt of frequent candidate Johnnie Mae Hackworthe to offer three Jersey cows in lieu of a $1,000 gubernatorial filing fee.

What could they have been thinking? Whither Lone Star democracy?

Ah, Johnnie Mae — or as she would have had it, the Rev. Johnnie Mae. Brenham's answer to Aimee Semple McPherson. Sometime operator of the House of Prayer. Sometime patient at various state institutions for the less than lucid. Sometime person of interest to the Secret Service for indiscreet comments as to what should happen to various presidents in the last half of the 20th century.

Bet you haven't seen Johnnie Mae's name on any of the little cookie-cutter scholastic tests that Texas school kids face these days.

In the macro-governmental scheme of things, "Pappy Lee" wasn't important, except perhaps for delaying the rise of Lyndon B. Johnson, whom O'Daniel narrowly and almost certainly crookedly defeated in the special Senate election of 1941. (LBJ was a fast learner; see 1948 Senate primary.) But O'Daniel was an early demonstration of the power of public communication in politics.

His rise was almost exclusively a function of a daily radio broadcast on a statewide hookup that touted his flour company and featured Western swing bands, first the Light Crust Doughboys and later the Hillbilly Boys. Their best known song was an O'Daniel ditty that became his theme song and provided his nickname, Please, Pass the Biscuits, Pappy.

Could this mean that Friedman is at least halfway to the Governor's Mansion, as one of his arguably biggest hits was an erudite commentary on baking: Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed?

One has to assume that Friedman is serious and that his round of appearances both in Texas and on the national talk-show circuit isn't wholly connected to promoting his latest novel.

Do not get O'Daniel (or Friedman, for that matter) confused with Jimmie Davis, although it's easy enough to do. Davis, best known musically as co-author of You Are My Sunshine, parlayed a career in country music into a run in politics that included two terms as governor next door in Louisiana (1944-48, 1960-64). Voters objected that Davis initially had gone "high hat" when he refused to sing at political rallies; but his more established pattern became (Kinky, please note) an hour of music and 10 minutes of speechifying.

Both O'Daniel and Davis were typical, conservative, racist Democrats of their day. They could thump a Bible and curse a Commie with equal aplomb. (Friedman, enduring an appearance on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, also expressed wry interest in doing some "spiritual lifting," but, then again, he also compared himself to Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

The religious schtick was one that the Rev. Hackworthe certainly would have recognized but one that she never turned to as much political profit as O'Daniel or Davis. Her initial specialty was combatting smut and demon rum.

In 1951, according to Chronicle clips, she threw iron weights through the front of a Brenham liquor store and smashed signs at a theater showing a racy (for 1951) adults-only movie. In a subsequent brush with the law in Houston, fabled defense attorney Percy Foreman was fined $100 for contempt of court as he argued Hackworthe's case.

In 1964, Hackworthe sought the Democratic nomination for governor and declared the Bible was "my platform." As a backstop, Hackworthe suggested to then-Sen. John G. Tower, R-Texas, that the GOP pick her as its presidential nominee, "being as I am queen of the South and wish to rule in the North also." (She couldn't have run any worse campaign that year than the actual Republican nominee, Barry M. Goldwater.)

O'Daniel eventually ran out of political steam, losing gubernatorial comeback races in 1956 and 1958. He died in Dallas in 1969. Davis, between his terms and after he left politics, kept up his music career and was 101 when he died at Baton Rouge in 2000.